Windspeakers

Oracles of the wind.

"The windspeakers guide us through the seasons as we guide our horses across the river. They carry our words on the winds and share their wisdom with all of the Orth.
Whether it is predicting the coming of spring so we can prepare to move out on the land or warning the hunters not to go out because a blizzard is coming, they keep us safe and prepared against nature."

— Tasiir of the People of the Horse

The First Windspeaker

The stories say that the first windspeaker was an orphan girl of a people forgotten to time. She spent a lot of time alone watching the land, the skies, and the animals. While many had dreamed of flight - without the aid of a powerful winged beast - she became the first to obtain it. After many designs, tries, failures, and lessons learned she completed the first kite capable of holding a person aloft.
Her knowledge of the wind and ability to fly led her to travel all across the Orthlands, sharing the goings on of each community with the others and encouraging or warning against actions with her ability to predict the weather. All of this earned her the name Ysiil - Windrider.
She passed these skills down to other orphans she met during her travels. Usually only giving a few instructions before moving on to the next community and checking in the next she passed through. This has continued to be the most common method of creating the next generation of windspeakers. A trainee becomes a full windspeaker when they complete their First Flight in the presence of their teacher - and often their entire community.

Carrying Words on the Wind

One of the primary duties of a windspeaker is to spread word of important events from one nomadic community to the others; births, deaths, upcoming weddings, strange happenings, requests for aid, and more. While all of these messages could be sent by a rider on horseback, the vantage granted by flying a kite allows a windspeaker to see far across the Orthlands and find the roaming communities.

Understanding the Seasons

More than messengers, windspeakers are individuals who are able to anticipate the change of the seasons by feeling the winds. This ability lets them help communities by letting them know when they should consider packing at the end of winter so they can start roaming the land again or to settle in for a coming winter.
Similarly, they are able to tell the coming weather with incredible accuracy which is useful to the Orth in a plethora of ways. While this ability is not unique to windspeakers, every windspeaker has it.

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The Three Sisters

While personification, worship, and mythology of the winds is common among many cultures of Breharan, it saturates the culture of the Orth more than any other. To the Orth, the three winds are sisters, each with a unique personality.
The summer wind is Iia, the eldest sister, and she is associated with love and anger. Haira is the middle sister and winter wind is the most dangerous of the three and her cruelty teaches important lessons. The wild wind Yaliru is not associated with a specific season and while the other sisters always blow in the same direction - except when they mingle together - she can change direction without warning and form small swirls in the air.

Status and Society

Windspeakers are considered special individuals in Orth society and are welcomed and well-treated everywhere they go - though this is little different to how all travelers are treated in the Orthlands. It is sometimes said that they spend so much time traveling to recover from all the attention, questions, and requests they get when they are in a village.
Windspeakers - and those training to be windspeakers - are exempt from some of the usual societal expectations, most notably the expectation to get married and have children. They also learn skills that cross the normal gender roles that are present in Orth culture.

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